APPLETON, Wis. — School district test scores across Wisconsin are slowly returning to pre-pandemic levels, according to an Education Recovery Scorecard report.

Only three school districts in the state are scoring above 2019 levels: Appleton, Howard-Suamico and Elmbrook.

Appleton Area School District officials credit score improvement to wise spending through investments in people. 

Inside Houdini Elementary in Appleton, teacher Beth Verboomen gave another session of targeted math instruction to fourth grader Haven Siguenza.

Verboomen said booster sessions like this are helping to recover student learning in the Appleton Area School District following the pandemic.

“As we said goodbye to them back in 2020 and then we knew when they came back, we were really going to have to focus on those foundational skills, and our conceptual understanding of skills in math,” Verboomen said.

Both math and reading scores in the Appleton School District experienced turnarounds.

Math scores dropped substantially in 2022 from 2019. In 2023, math scores rebounded close to pre-pandemic levels.

Reading scores were low in 2019 and dropped to "less than satisfactory" in 2022. In 2023, reading scores were way above pre-pandemic levels.

The academic bounce back happened under the watch of Appleton Superintendent Greg Hartjes. He said the district’s learning recovery is due to money and people.

“The credit goes to a lot of hard work from people that we hired using ESSER dollars, so pandemic relief dollar. So a lot of districts did different things with those dollars. We chose to put them into people, people that could work directly with our students. And so, we’re talking about math and reading interventionists,” he said.

Verboomen is a math interventionist. She helps students fill learning gaps brought on by pandemic learning.

“We really targeted our instruction, when the kids were able to return back to us. So having a student-centered approach to purposeful instruction was really key for our students to make progress in math and in reading,” Verboomen said.

Thanks to interventionists, Siguenza is performing better in school. Siguenza said her two favorite subjects now are math and reading. 

“I can understand… math, that I can understand more subjects and stuff,” Siguenza said.

Throughout this academic rebound, Verboomen said interventionists have also gotten help.

“Teachers have been really good about changing instruction or doing additional assessments to really target what their students need,” Verboomen said.